Keynote Speakers

Michael Sherraden

Michael Sherraden, a graduate of Harvard (AB) and the University of Michigan (MSW, PhD), is Benjamin E. Youngdahl Professor of Social Development and founding director of the Brown School’s Center for Social Development (CSD) at Washington University in St Louis. CSD tests policy innovations that have the potential to improve social and economic outcomes. Sherraden is the author of Assets and the Poor (1991), which proposes Individual Development Accounts (IDAs), matched savings to enable low-income families to save and accumulate assets. Additional research on asset building appears in Inclusion in the American Dream (2005) and Can the Poor Save? (2007). IDAs have been adopted in federal legislation, in more than 40 states, and in many other countries. An IDA program in Seoul—known as “Hope Development Accounts”—won a United Nations Public Service Award in 2010. Currently, CSD is undertaking an experimental test of Child Development Accounts (universal accounts at birth) in the State of Oklahoma, and research on youth savings is underway in Colombia, Ghana, Kenya, and Nepal. In another areas of work, Sherraden’s early research on civic service—National Service (1982) and The Moral Equivalent of War? (1990)—contributed to the creation of AmeriCorps in 1993, and CSD is today a leading center of research on civic service, especially international service. Also, CSD has large initiatives to study Productive Aging in both the United States and China. In 2010, Sherraden was listed on the Time 100 most influential people in the world. He is married to Margaret Sherrard Sherraden, PhD, who is also a research colleague at CSD.

Michael Lomax

Since 2004, Dr. Michael Lomax has been president and chief executive officer of UNCF, the nation’s largest private provider of scholarships and other educational support to minority and low-income students. Before coming to UNCF, Lomax was president of UNCF-member institution Dillard University in New Orleans and a literature professor at UNCF member institutions Morehouse and Spelman Colleges. He also served as chairman of the Fulton County Commission in Atlanta, the first African American elected to that post. Throughout his career, Lomax has worked to provide educational opportunities for underrepresented Americans. As president and CEO of UNCF, he oversees UNCF’s 400 scholarship programs, including the UNCF Gates Millennium Scholars Program, a 20-year, $1.6 billion program whose 14,000 low-income minority recipients have a 90 percent college graduation rate. He also launched the UNCF Institute for Capacity Building, which helps UNCF's 39 member historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) become stronger, more effective and more self-sustaining in such critical areas as fund-raising and building strong academic programs that prepare their students for careers in the global economy.

A leading advocate for the importance of cradle-through-college education for all Americans, Lomax is co-chair of the Education Equality Project, a member of the Aspen Institute’s Commission on No Child Left Behind and a member of the governing boards of Teach For America, the KIPP Foundation and the National Alliance of Public Charter Schools. He is also a frequent contributor to the National Journal's Education Experts blog and author of the “MorehouseMan” blog at Essence.com. Lomax also serves on the boards of the Smithsonian Institution’s Museum of African American History and Culture and the Studio Museum of Harlem. He founded the National Black Arts Festival.

Mark Rank

Mark R. Rank is widely recognized as one of the foremost experts and speakers in the country on issues of poverty, inequality, and social justice. Dr. Rank’s areas of research and teaching have focused on poverty, social welfare, economic inequality, and social policy. His first book, "Living on the Edge: The Realities of Welfare in America," explored the conditions of surviving on public assistance, and achieved widespread critical acclaim. Professor Rank's most recent book, "One Nation, Underprivileged: Why American Poverty Affects Us All," provides a new understanding of poverty in America. His life-course research has demonstrated for the first time that a majority of Americans will experience poverty and will use a social safety net program at some point during their lives. He is currently working on a book with his long-time collaborator, Thomas Hirschl of Cornell University that explores various aspects of economic risk and turmoil across the adulthood years. Their research is designed to shed empirical light on the tenuous nature of the American Dream in today's society, and how to restore its relevance and vitality.

In addition to writing books, Dr. Rank has published articles in numerous academic journals across a wide variety of fields. Professor Rank is the recipient of many awards including the Founders Day Distinguished Faculty Award from the Washington University Alumni Board of Governors, the Faculty Award to Improve Learning from the William T. Kemper Foundation, the Outstanding Research Award from the Society for Social Work and Research, the Feldman Award from the Groves Conference on Marriage and the Family, and the Outstanding Faculty Award from the Brown School’s Alumni Association.

Dr. Rank's research has been reported in a wide range of media outlets including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, The Christian Science Monitor, The Chicago Tribune, USA Today, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and National Public Radio. He has provided his research expertise to members of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, as well as to many national and state organizations involved in issues of economic and social justice.

Presenters

Deborah Adams

Deborah Adams is Associate Professor at the University of Kansas in the School of Social Welfare, and a Faculty Associate of Washington University’s Center for Social Development. Her scholarly interests include asset building, with a particular focus on asset effects in the lives of women and children. From 2003 through 2007, she led a team of researchers from the University of Kansas and the University of Michigan in studies of the 12 community-based Children’s Development Account programs in the national SEED initiative. Dr. Adams’ most recent publications include articles with colleagues from the SEED research team on youth perceptions of the effects of asset building, and on parent perspectives on effective individual and institutional components of children’s asset-building programs. She co-chaired the SEED Research Advisory Council with Michael Sherraden. Dr. Adams earned her Ph.D. in social work from Washington University in St. Louis, where she was an Olin Fellow.

Sandy Beverly

(Center for Social Development, email sbeverly@sunflower.com)
Sondra Beverly is Senior Scholar at the Center for Social Development at Washington University in St. Louis and has over twelve years of experience researching asset-building in low-income families. She has helped design and implement a large quasi-experimental study of children’s savings accounts as well as smaller multi-method studies of programs that offer low-cost savings accounts and refund-splitting during tax season. Current research projects involve SEED for Oklahoma Kids, an experimental study of universal, progressive Child Development Accounts.

Beverly received her M.S.W and Ph.D. from the Brown School of Social Work at Washington University and an M.A. in economics from the University of Missouri - St. Louis. She was an assistant and associate professor in the School of Social Welfare at the University of Kansas from 2000 to 2007. In 2003, Beverly received the Outstanding Research Award from the Society for Social Work and Research for research on material hardship.

Gregory Cheatham

Greg Cheatham is an Assistant Professor in Special Education and University of Kansas. He earned an M.S.W. and a doctorate in special education at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research and scholarship focuses on diversity issues within special education and early childhood. He is particularly interested in the interplay of culture, language, and the provision of effective educational services for young children and families. Professor Cheatham was an associate editor for the journal Young Exceptional Children, which is published by the Division for Early Childhood (DEC) of the Council for Exceptional Children (CEC). He also serves as an editorial board member for research journals within the field of early childhood special education.

Gina Chowa

Gina Chowa is an assistant professor at UNC Chapel Hill and a Faculty Associate at Center for Social Development at Washington University in St Louis. Chowa’s research interests are in international social development, particularly in asset building, HIV/AIDS, social protection, and financial capability. Her work has included investigating the impacts of asset interventions on financial capability, household economic and social wellbeing. Currently, she is leading a study in Zambia investigating the impacts of asset ownership on adherence to drugs and future orientation of people living with HIV/AIDS, in Kibera, Kenya and South Africa on impacts of savings for low-income youth transition to higher education and permanent employment. Chowa is also Co-Principal investigator on the experiment in the YouthSave Project investigating impacts of youth savings on youth developmental outcomes in four countries; Ghana, Kenya, Columbia and Nepal. She has also worked in Uganda investigating the impacts of microenterprise on wealth and psycho-social outcomes.

Conley’s research focuses on the determinants of economic opportunity within and across generations. In this vein, he studies sibling differences in socioeconomic success; racial inequalities; the measurement of class; and how health and biology affect (and are affected by) social position. In 2005, he became the first sociologist to win the National Science Foundation’s Alan T. Waterman Award, given annually to one young researcher in any field of science, mathematics or engineering.

Conley holds a B.A. from the University of California — Berkeley, an M.P.A. & a Ph.D. in Sociology from Columbia University, and an M.S. & M.Phil. in Biology from NYU. He is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Biology at the Center for Genomics and Systems Biology at NYU, studying phenotypic capacitance and socially regulated genes.

Mesmin Destin

Mesmin Destin earned his PhD in social psychology from the University of Michigan, in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He is currently an Assistant Professor at Northwestern University in the Department of Psychology and the School of Education and Social Policy. Destin’s research centers primarily on understanding broad societal issues and trends, such as socioeconomic disparities in educational attainment, from a psychological perspective. His work employs laboratory and field experimental methods, in addition to national data analysis.

Destin has developed and tested social psychological interventions, like distributing college financial aid information and drawing attention to the financial rewards of college, which significantly improved immediate academic motivation for low-income youth during early adolescence. His work with national data, including the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, highlights the influence of parental assets and educational expectations on children’s likelihood of high school graduation and college enrollment. Destin’s ongoing work continues to investigate the psychological factors that underlie the connection of resources, including assets, to motivation and outcomes for youth.

William Elliott III

Dr. William Elliott III is an assistant professor in the School of Social Welfare at the University of Kansas. He currently serves as a faculty associate for the Center for Social Development, Center for Race and Social Problems, and he is a Senior Research Fellow for New America Foundation’s Asset Building Program. He is a member on the Editorial Board for the Journal of Children and Poverty. Dr. Elliott is a leading researcher in the field of children's savings and college matriculation and success. He has written extensively on the relationship between assets and children's educational outcomes. His work has been featured by The Washington Post, Money&Happiness, CBS’s MoneyWatch.com, San Francisco Chronicle, and Metro Newspapers. Moreover, in a recent announcement for GEAR UP funding the U.S. Department of Education cites his research as part of their rationale for an invitational priority to develop financial access and college savings accounts as part of the GEAR UP application. Dr. Elliott was also a member of the evaluation team for the I Can Save project where he designed interview instruments, interviewed students, collected data, conducted quantitative and qualitative analyses, and wrote and published several scholarly papers. I Can Save is one of twelve sites of the “Saving for Education, Entrepreneurship, and Downpayment” (SEED) national demonstration of CDAs. Additionally, Dr. Elliott has conducted research on The Pittsburgh Promise, a scholarship program for Pittsburg Public School students. Combined, his work on these projects provides him with a wide variety of knowledge about CDAs, scholarship programs, and college success.

Terri Friedline

Terri Friedline is a PhD Candidate at the University of Pittsburgh's School of Social Work and a Research Fellow at the New American Foundation in Washington, DC. She also holds an MSW from the University of Pittsburgh and a BSW from Messiah College. Ms. Friedline's research focuses on interventions and related theories for improving children's life outcomes, particularly for children from disadvantaged backgrounds. Along these lines, Ms. Friedline's work explores how children come to have savings accounts and whether their continued savings leads to improved long-term financial and educational outcomes. Her current research examines these relationships by employing advanced quantitative methods with longitudinal, secondary data. Ms. Friedline also collaborates with the U.S. Department of Education on its national GEAR UP initiative that aims to improve college attendance and graduation rates for children from disadvantaged backgrounds. As part of this collaboration, she is working to analyze data from GEAR UP initiatives nationwide and to consult on how future GEAR UP initiatives might incorporate and design children's savings interventions.

Michal Grinstein-Weiss

Michal Grinstein-Weiss is an Associate Professor at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, School of Social Work and the Founding Director of the Assets-Building Research Group. She a leading researcher in the asset-building field and is an influential voice in the design of policies aimed at increasing child savings, both in the United States and internationally. Grinstein-Weiss is the Principal Investigator for a 10-year follow-up study of the American Dream Demonstration (ADD), the first large-scale test of Individual Development Accounts (IDAs). In addition, she is working on innovative tax refund savings programs such as the $aveNYC program and the Refund to Savings Initiative. Her research has been supported by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, several leading national research centers, and numerous philanthropic foundations. Recently, Grinstein-Weiss was selected as the winner of the 2011 Society for Social work and Research Deborah K. Padgett Early Career Achievement Award. Grinstein-Weiss received a Ph.D. in Social Work at George Warren Brown School of Social Work at Washington University in St. Louis and a master’s degree in economics from the University of Missouri, St. Louis.

Mike Hock

Michael Hock, Ph.D. is Associate Research Scientist at the University of Kansas and Associate Director of the Center for Research on Learning (KU-CRL). He is also director of the KU-CRL Institute for Research on Adolescent Literacy. He has experience in the design and validation of instructional strategies and practices for improving student outcomes for adolescents who struggle with learning. As a scholar and developer, Michael has directed research and development efforts with adolescents and adults in literacy-based programs. He has been instrumental in the development of reading interventions for an NICHD funded adult literacy project that focuses on fundamentals of reading, decoding, vocabulary, word identification, and fluency. Currently, he is co-principal investigator on an Institute for Education Science Teacher Quality grant designed to improve the instructional effectiveness of middle school science teachers and the reading and science outcomes of their students. He is also PI on a D.O.E. funded Striving Readers grant involving middle and high school struggling readers in the state of Michigan. He was the PI on an Institute for Education Science funded adolescent reading project in which he and his colleagues developed and validated an adolescent reading program called Fusion Reading. On another Department of Education grant, he is helping to develop mobile technology to support student practice of literacy skills. Michael is experienced in the use of video technology in assessment and validation of interventions. He was funded by the Wal-Mart Foundation to establish Strategic Tutoring support programs in Boys and Girls Clubs of America after school programs. These after school programs also helped nurture student motivation and goal setting through Possible Selves, a program Michael designed to nurture motivation and goal setting. Most recently, he was funded by the Institute for Education Science for a project to develop and test a measure of motivation for reading. Finally, he currently serves on two national advisory committees that focus on effective instruction for adolescents and adults who struggle with learning.

Jin Huang

Jin Huang is an Assistant Professor at Saint Louis University School of Social Work
and a faculty associate at the Center for Social Development at Washington
University’s Brown School. He is interested in social policy that supports
family and child well-being, with a particular focus on asset-based policy for
disadvantaged children and children with disabilities. Using large longitudinal
survey data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, his dissertation examines
how family assets may contribute to educational and health outcomes for
children with disabilities. Dr. Huang has published articles in peer-reviewed
social work journals, such as Social Service Review, Social Work
Research, Social Science Research, and Children and Youth
Services Review. He received his PhD in social work from the George Warren
Brown School of Social Work at Washington University in St. Louis in 2011. In
summer 2010, he conducted a research internship on measuring non-cash benefits
and material hardship at the Social Security Administration in Washington DC.

Youngmi Kim

Youngmi Kim is an Assistant Professor in Virginia Commonwealth University School of Social Work. Her research interests include poverty dynamics and impacts of parents’ resources on child outcomes. She is particularly involved in research on distinctive roles of assets and material hardship. In related research, she has worked on asset-building social policies and programs at both national and international levels. She is working on research for Saving for Education, Entrepreneurship and Downpayment for Oklahoma Kids (SEED OK), a large-scale social experiment testing universal Child Development Accounts. She is also a Principal-Investigator in the study of the Hope Plus Savings Accounts program, Individual Development Accounts demonstration project for working poor families in Korea.

She completed her MSW and PhD at the Brown School of Social Work of Washington University in St. Louis. Prior to joining VCU, She was a Post-Doctoral research fellow at the Center for Social Development in Washington University.

Annette Otto is a research assistant and lecturer in the Educational Psychology Department in the Institute of Psychology at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (Mainz, Germany). She also is an Honorary University Fellow in the College of Life and Environmental Sciences at the University of Exeter (UK). Her initial experimental work on children’s saving has been published in the Journal of Economic Psychology. For her thesis she investigated the economic psychology of adolescent saving. She then gained a research position at the University in Mainz, which allowed her to continue her research on young people’s saving in Germany. She is a member of the International Association of Economic Psychology and the Academic Research Expert Group of ChildandYouth Finance International.

Daphna Oyserman

Daphna Oyserman is a social scientist at the University of Michigan, where she holds appointments as Professor of Psychology, Edwin J. Thomas Collegiate Professor of Social Work, and Research Professor in the Institute for Social Research. She was recently a fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences (2009–2010); other honors include a W.T. Grant Faculty Scholar Award, the Humboldt Scientific Contribution Prize of the German Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, two “Best Research Paper” awards from the Society for Social Work Research, and Fellow status in the American Psychological Association, Association for Psychological Science, and Society for Experimental Social Psychology. Following her 1987 PhD at the University of Michigan, she held faculty appointments at a number of universities before returning to the University of Michigan.

Oyserman’s theory of identity ‐ based motivation (IBM, Oyserman, 2007, 2009a, 2009b) conceptualizes the underlying processes and guides the development of interventions that have been tested in experiments as well as randomized trials in public schools in Detroit and its environs as well as Chicago, with some studies also conducted in other sites in the U.S. as well as Israel and France. The IBM model assumes that identity is multifaceted and dynamically constructed in context. People interpret situations in ways that are congruent with their currently active identity and prefer identity ‐ congruent actions over identity ‐ incongruent ones. Future self goals such as school may or may not be salient in the moment: when cued to see the future self as congruent with the current self, students are more likely to take action to attain their goals. Felt congruence also influences the interpretation of any difficulties students encounter: when the behavior is identity congruent, experienced difficulty highlights that it is important and meaningful; when the behavior is identity incongruent, the same difficulty suggests that it is pointless and “not for people like me.” These perceptions have important downstream effects on important behaviors including in ‐ class disruptions vs. engagement, time spent on homework, standardized test scores and grades in school.

Trina Williams Shanks

Trina Shanks is an associate professor of social work. She completed her Ph.D. and Masters in Social Work from Washington University in St. Louis and is also a faculty associate with its Center for Social Development. In 1994 she was awarded the Rhodes scholarship to study at the University of Oxford, where she earned a Masters in Comparative Social Research. In addition to her graduate schooling, Dr. Shanks served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Ecuador working in micro-enterprise development and served as executive director of Christian Community Services, a church-affiliated not-for-profit agency she was invited to help form in Nashville, Tennessee. Shanks initiated its family mentoring program and introduced Individual Development Accounts to its work with public housing residents. In her current research, funded by the Ford Foundation, she is co-investigator for the SEED Impact Assessment study, which sets up a quasi-experimental research design in Pontiac, Michigan, to test the impact of offering Head Start families 529 college education plans for their enrolled children. Other areas of research/scholarly interest: the relationship between assets, poverty and children's well-being; public policy for families; social and economic development, particularly in urban communities.

Thomas Shapiro

Professor Thomas Shapiro directs the Institute on Assets and Social Policy (IASP) and is the Pokross Professor of Law and Social Policy at The Heller School for Social Policy and Management, Brandeis University. Professor Shapiro's primary interest is in racial inequality and public policy, for which IASP released a brief in May 2010 (“The Racial Wealth Gap Increases Fourfold”). He is a leader in the asset development field with a particular focus on closing the racial wealth gap. The Hidden Cost of Being African American: How Wealth Perpetuates Inequality, published by Oxford University Press, 2004 was widely reviewed. The book was named one of the Notable Books of 2004 by The St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

With Dr. Melvin Oliver, he wrote the award-winning Black Wealth/ White Wealth, which received the 1997 Distinguished Scholarly Publication Award from the American Sociological Association. and the 1995 C. Wright Mills Award from the Society for the Study of Social Problems. A Tenth Anniversary Edition of Black Wealth/White Wealth, with two new chapters, was published in 2006.

His media appearances include Tony Brown's Journal, The Tavis Smiley Show, Talk of the Nation, CNN, On Point, and the Rachel Maddow Show (MSNBC). His work has been reviewed or discussed in The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The American Prospect, The Chicago Sun-Times, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, CommonWealth Magazine, Newsweek, The Village Voice, and others. In 2011 he was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to study the wealth gap in South Africa.

Margaret Sherraden

Margaret Sherrard Sherraden is Professor, School of Social Work, University of Missouri - St. Louis, and Research Professor, Center for Social Development, Washington University in St. Louis. Her recent research examines youth and adult savings and financial capability in the US and developing countries. She has a forthcoming volume on Financial Capability: Research, Education, Policy, and Practice (Oxford University Press, edited with J Birkenmaier & J Curley). She is lead author of three books: Striving to Save: Creating Policies for Financial Security of Low-Income Families (University of Michigan Press, 2010, with AM McBride); Kitchen Capitalism: Microenterprise in Low-Income Households (State University of New York Press, 2004, with CK Sanders & M Sherraden); and Community Economic Development and Social Work (Haworth Press, 1998, edited with W Ninacs). Sherraden earned a Ph.D. in sociology from Washington University, an M.A. in social work from the University of Chicago, and a B.A. in sociology and Spanish from Beloit College.

Paul Webley

(University of London; pw2@soas.ac.uk)
School of Oriental and African Studies, Thornhaugh Street, Russell Square, London WC1H0XG

Professor Paul Webley has been Professor of Economic Psychology and Director of the School of Oriental and African Studies, London, since August 2006 and is currently also Deputy Vice-Chancellor of the University of London. He is Chair of UKCISA (the UK Council for International Student Affairs), and a member of the Boards oftheUniversities and Colleges Employers Associationand London Higher (the regional University Association for London). Professor Webley was elected an Academician of the Academy of Social Sciences in 2010.

Professor Webley’s general academic aim has been to explore the contribution that psychology can make to our understanding of problems that have traditionally been seen as the concern solely of economics. He has written a number of books (notably Tax evasion: an experimental approach and Children’s saving, and most recently The Economic Psychology of Everyday Life which has been translated into Italian and Korean). His current research focuses on children’s economic behaviour and tax compliance.

Min Zhan

Min Zhan is an Associate Professor with the School of Social Work, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Dr. Zhan is also a faculty associate of the Center for Social Development at Washington University. As a social policy researcher, Zhan has studied various topics related to poverty, social welfare policies, and socioeconomic inequality. Her research centers on examining the impact of postsecondary education, financial asset development, and financial management training in the economic well-being of low-income families. Her research has been published in more than 30 journal articles, and in book chapters and reports. She received her Ph.D. in social work from Washington University in St. Louis.